Two archives, queried live.
Every record below comes from The Met or Smithsonian Open Access and was filtered on that archive’s own rights field before it reached this page. 12 shown for “Illustration for Hamlet: Hamlet and the Queen (III,4)” — 24 records examined, 4 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-01 02:12 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.Smithsonian Open Access: HTTP 429 from api.si.edu. Results from the remaining archive are shown unchanged — nothing is substituted for a source that did not answer.

Hamlet and the Queen
Eugène Delacroix · 1834

The Hamlet of Optevoz
Charles-François Daubigny · ca. 1852

Armor Garniture of George Clifford (1558–1605), Third Earl of Cumberland
Jacob Halder · 1586

The Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, Queen of France
Jean Pucelle · ca. 1324–28

The Death of Hamlet
Eugène Delacroix · 1843

The Queen Tries to Console Hamlet
Eugène Delacroix · 1834

The Belles Heures of Jean de France, duc de Berry
The Limbourg Brothers · 1405–1408/1409

Hamlet and Horatio before the Gravediggers
Eugène Delacroix · 1843

The Death of Ophelia
Eugène Delacroix · 1843

Hamlet Tries To Follow His Father's Ghost
Eugène Delacroix · 1835

The Ghost on the Terrace
Eugène Delacroix · 1843

The Play-Within-A-Play
Eugène Delacroix · 1835
Where these records came from.
Two archives are wired, and only two. Each one is filtered on its own rights field — never on a title match, and never on the presence of an image file.
- The Met Collection API (Open Access)Rights field:
isPublicDomain. 137 matched · 24 examined · 4 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.12 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. HTTP 429 from api.si.edu. No records from this archive are shown for this query.Unavailable
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-01 02:12 UTC, during this request. A completed pass is kept for 24 hours and replayed for an identical search, which is what keeps repeated queries inside Smithsonian’s 30-requests-per-hour allowance. A pass in which either archive failed to answer is never kept — an outage must not be replayed as though it were a finding about the catalogue.
Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress are deliberately not wired. Wikimedia was confirmed, on a live query, to return CC-BY material inside the same result set as genuine public domain works, and filtering it safely has not been designed yet. loc.gov was blocked by bot detection during the source evaluation, so its rights vocabulary has never been observed — and nothing here is built on a field nobody has read.
An image file is a rights claim. It never travels without its field.